American Freedom vs. Real Freedom: A Declaration of Dependence
By Austin
I was perusing the comments over at Christianity Today in response to the decision about the national day of prayer (that I wrote about here - see more from Kathy Kattenburg here). There was some lament in there, along with some atheist who must be trolling the comments and being obnoxious. Some of the responses by Christians were:
“what a sad day for America. They are surely taking away all our freedoms. The leadership in this country makes me sick.” (Marrie Rowe)
“Wow such a sad day in America. The atheist have their right to believe or not to believe as we have our right to believe in God or not, it is our freedom OF religion… The Constitution is slowly being re-written and some people do not even realize it. People need to wake up. We need God BACK in America today. We as christians need to PRAY for our nation.” (Cindy Peplaw)
These are pretty standard responses from Evangelicals. Cindy is certainly right that we need to pray for our nation (see Jeremiah 29), but what many of my fellow Evangelicals get wrong is the nature of freedom in the U.S.
Evangelicals in the U.S. have a real thing for religious freedom. If I criticize it too much they would say to me, ‘image if you lived in a country where you weren’t free to worship! It would be awful!’ And of course there’s some truth to that (although they often forget that the most vibrant places for the church are often in the most oppressive – and there is a good theological reason for that). But there is a bigger truth often missed – that in America, our founding document called “The Constitution” gives absolutely no guarantee of freedom.
Do we think that Paul wasn’t serious when he says ”you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness…” (Rom 6.16)? When Christians posit the antithesis between “sin” and “Christ” they seem to completely forget the fact that America rests on the “sin” side of the ledger, because there is only one thing on the “Christ” side of the ledger - Jesus himself! That’s another way to say “Jesus is Lord.”
Another way to put this is the way John Howard Yoder does. He says:
One of the major efforts of spiritual gear-shifting involved in thinking Christianly is that of getting over this revolutionary idea of freedom, as meaning being left alone to do as one wants, ‘free’ of any outside influence or controls. The freedom of the Christian is not freedom from as much as freedom to: what matters is not fromwhat we are freed, but for what.
For the Bible is more realistic than the revolutionaries of 1776 or 1789; it tells us that we have a choice, not between freedom and unfreedom, but between two kinds of slavery…God gives us the freedom to choose whom we will serve. (The Christian’s Declaration of Indepedence)
And this should properly be called a declaration of dependence.
A Victory for Christians – No more Day of Prayer
By Austin
Kathy Kattenburg over at the Moderate Voice points to a story NPR did about a U.S. District court ruling that makes it unconstitutional for the President to proclaim a national day of prayer (a practice that stared in 1952).
Why do I say this is a victory? Because for too long, American Christians have blurred the distinction between worship of God in church and worship of nation at sporting events, national holidays, and schools.
But this blurring is wrong. Christianity has always defined itself against such provincial bonds because it proclaims the life, death, and resurrection is for all peoples, and that the church is universal. I have more in common with my Chinese, Iranian, or Cuban bothers and sisters in Christ than I do with my American neighbors who do not confess Jesus as Lord.
Holidays like the “National Day of Prayer,” while often initiated in good faith, actually participate in national “liturgies” of unity. And these liturgies have a specific function that Christians are often confused about. I’ve heard Christians say that national day of prayer should help us get back to the faith of the founding fathers (read Drew’s discussion of such “faith” here), but the real function of these liturgies is to develop a primary loyalty to one’s nation, rather than a loyalty to Jesus. It does not rule out loyalty to Jesus (obviously that’s a part of this holiday), but it promotes a particular vision of what that loyalty means - the hope is that by getting the country “back onto God’s path” the country itself will prosper and flourish.
But the main guarantee of loyalty to Jesus is not success. In fact, the one guarantee is that if you follows the way of the cross, you will suffer (consider: Acts 5.40-42; Acts 9.15-16; Rom 8.16-18). The attitude of early Christians we see in the New Testament, and texts form figures like Polycarp and Ignatius of Antioch, is that they expected and welcomed suffering. They almost universally did not expect prosperity – which is one of the reasons Romans found them so strange (their view was that Christians were atheists, anti-family, and immoral). Roman civic religion, as Augustine noted in the City of God, promised prosperity to the nation. But Christians knew, said Augustine, that the real “patria” (fatherland) is not the nation, but Jesus.
So this is indeed a real victory for Christians. The more our faith is publically distanced from the nation, the freer we are to be who we are. If we truly confess Jesus as Lord, we will always remember what the Epistle to Diognetus says about Christians:
They live in their own countries, but only as nonresidents; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign.
The Christian Witness to the State
By Austin
Drew’s post this morning on his philosophical breakdown in his critique of the Tea Partiers is interesting. He points out that faith informs us no matter what, so what’s the difference between his view of transgendered rights based on Galatians 3, and Sarah Palin?
Obviously a lot. But what? In two of my posts (here and here). I’ve begun to think about this, but Drew has provoked me: what is the Christian witness to the state? How ought faith and politics work together? I noted in those posts that “faith” or “belief” cannot merely be compartmentalized, as if the were free-flowing ideas picked and thrown into a soup of “political ideas.” They holistically inform us, as Drew says. So what’s appropriate?
One of Drew’s implicit insights is that everyone has a theology. Everyone. Atheists politicians and Christian politics alike. Everyone has that end-point where they can do nothing but worship, whether that be some god or science, some document (like the Constitution of the Tea Partiers) or an ideal of progress. Clearly there is a continuum – we hedge against too much theology in our politics, like that “wall of separation,” but we can’t but help ourselves. In Calvin’s words, we are a factory of idols.
If this is the case we must find an appropriate way to relate to the state. Fortunately for Jews and Christians, there are some very pressing internal criteria for this relation. It should not be:
a. Idolatrous. The state’s goals and being cannot be conflated with God. Almost all states in history have somehow or other claimed the authority of God (especially over life and death), and implicitly or explicitly identified themselves with God. The Tea Party’s rituals during the health care protests divinize a mythic “America,” as do progressives who in the 60′s and 70′s saw secularism as the answer to the world’s political prayers.
b. Our Primary allegiance. Let’s state this clearly: our primary allegiance is not to our country, but to God’s nation. “Citizenship in heaven” does not mean our citizenship is “spiritual.” This passage talks about the transformation of the body. We are put in the midst of a world that is broken and hostile, a sleeper cell called witness to the coming reign of God in the middle of all this hate and violence, loving our enemies when others won’t, preaching God’s all-inclusive when our nation preaches an exclusive love based on soil.
To state this all positively: we worship the one God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who is also the head of our country. Yet this reign is not fully here, and in the in-between time we are empowered through the Spirit to bring his policies – justice and peace, healing and community, reconciliation and love – into this present evil age.
So Drew is right about “civic religion.” For the Christian, that would be idolatrous. The U.S. is not nor ever has been a Christian nation. The kingdom of God is a Christian nation, with Christ as head. The Christian’s witness takes off from this fact.
Yet this doesn’t mean you can’t see certain characteristics of God’s kingdom in nations at times. Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to traditions in American thought that are certainly congruent with the kingdom of God, like equality (no wonder – he was a preacher!). The theologian John Howard Yoder called these “middle axioms”, places where the kingdom of God and the world meet. As citizens of this kingdom, these axioms enable us to communicate the policies of this kingdom to the nations, or as Drew says, practitioners of other faiths or non-faith.
In summary to this rather long response to Drew: faith and politics are always together, but as Christians our primary allegiance is to the kingdom of God, not to our country. We participate in our country’s politics because that is one place where we can advocate for the policies of this kingdom (but there are other places too!), and we will often do this through “middle axioms.” When this becomes a problem is when our nation (whether current or more a mythological “America”) usurps the place of God.
Yet as long as we realize who we worship, and where our allegiance lies, our faith empowers our politics. In future posts, I’ll talk more about some political axioms…
The Tea Party and Civic Religion, Part II: Church and State
by Andrew Dyrli Hermeling
Part II: Church and State
Let us begin with a little compare and contrast, reminiscing on our middle school days [daze] and our teachers’ affinity for Venn diagrams. On the one hand, the European nations of Norway, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Greece (to name but a few) all have official state religions (Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Reformed, and Eastern Orthodoxy respectively). Yet most would agree that the prevailing cultures of these nations are decidedly secular. The church has been relegated to the position of glorified census and records bureau and holds very little sway over mores and cultural movements. On the other hand, the United States was founded upon a firm commitment toward political secularism. While the New England colonies did indeed adopt a policy of state religion, the concept was abandoned by the time of the Revolution. However, despite our tradition of political secularism, mores and cultural definitions within the nation are often critiqued and defined using theistic, if not specifically Christian biblical language.
As stated in my previous post, the founders attempted to create a system of governance based upon the principles of reason, a power that many of them perceived as being diametrically opposed toward the failings of human passions. Thomas Jefferson cites the First Amendment of the Constitution as creating a “wall of separation” between church and state during a letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802. This view is rooted in the writings of John Locke, who felt that the government had no say in the individual conscience. Furthermore, in 1797, a treaty signed with Tripoli stated that the government was not founded in anyway in accordance with the Christian religion. Moreover, James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, clearly stated that his intent in the writing of the First Amendment was to secure separation of church and state. “We are teaching the world the great truth that Govts. do better without Kings & Nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson that Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Govt.”
So where does the false memory of a time when God was an official member of political discourse come from? I believe that two theories hold water (not to suggest that they are the only two), appealing to two very different political movements. The first was the necessity of moral language and a religious imperative during the struggle for the full citizenship of African-Americans. The inability of the emotionally disconnected language of politics to fully deal with the issue of slavery forced abolitionists to change their rhetoric and voice their cause by illustrating why slavery was in fact evil in a very spiritual sense. Abolitionists argued against the practice of slavery in much the same way that conservatives argue against abortion today. Logic and reason has very little voice in the dialogue, and most people today would agree that it need not in the case of slavery, yet the nation is woefully divided over the appropriateness of such language in the dialogue over abortion rights. Moreover, it is a rare outlier who is offended by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, despite the fact that it deliberately combined the spheres of religion and politics in order to achieve a purely political goal.
In regards to the second theory, I would argue that the adaptation of “God language” within the political vernacular happened as a direct response to the political language of atheism used by Communism during the middle of the 20th century. This is most evident in the addition of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance as adopted in 1954. In the 18th century, the opposition to theistic language in politics was an overt attempt to distance the political system of the United States from those of Europe, where God was used as justification for authority. The same need for linguistic contrast in the 20th century caused this reversal. As a nation we insisted that we were diametrically opposed to the godless “Russkies” and began illustrating this polarization by overtly stating that we were “one nation, under God.”
However, despite the adoption of theistic language in political discourse, it is clear once again that this was not the Founders’ intent. In part III of this critique, we will analyze whether the intent of the Founders is reasonable.
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